


It's Not a Choice

by KittyViolet



Category: Excalibur (Comic), X-Men (Comicverse)
Genre: Bisexual Female Character, Bisexuality, Canon-Compliant, F/F, F/M, Multi, Polyamory Negotiations, almost nothing "happens", loving someone metal, loving two ppl who are metal but in very different senses of "metal", mature life decisions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-09
Updated: 2018-01-09
Packaged: 2019-02-14 01:21:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,926
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12996738
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KittyViolet/pseuds/KittyViolet
Summary: Set in mid-2018 X-continuity, right after Iceman #9 and Rogue/ Gambit #1 (rather than in any other fic's alternate future), but before X-Men Gold #30. It should be canon-compliant, as well as compliant with "Office Hours" (if it's not compliant, I welcome corrections in comments).





	It's Not a Choice

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Office Hours](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3439640) by [GrayJay](https://archiveofourown.org/users/GrayJay/pseuds/GrayJay). 



> Set in mid-2018 X-continuity, right after Iceman #9 and Rogue/ Gambit #1 (rather than in any other fic's alternate future), but before X-Men Gold #30. It should be canon-compliant, as well as compliant with "Office Hours" (if it's not compliant, I welcome corrections in comments).

What do you do when you realize that the person you would give up everything for, who'd give up everything for you, and the person to whom you can say anything,  who totally got and still gets you, aren't the same person, and maybe they never were?

What do you do when they're brother and sister?

There are, Kitty thinks, worse problems. She and her friends have totally had them. (For example, being trapped for years in a demon dimension; being taken over by a Brood queen; being lost in space. For another example: what if there's no one who gets you? what if there's no one who looks at you that way?)

Like pretty much everything in Kitty's life since the age of 13 3/4 (sometimes it's given as 13 1/2, but she used to insist on 3/4) it's a problem that pops up where peril and privilege meet, where she knows that she should really feel lucky about something that's also eating her up inside. (Not literally eating her up inside; that was the Brood queen, which was far worse.)

 One way to solve this problem-- but it's a bad way, and healthy mutants avoid it-- is to be so thoroughly str8 (she remembers when she believed she and Doug had invented spelling with numbers instead of letters) that you only fall in love with guys, but only really ever trust girls, because guys are some other species. That was what marriage looked like for her schoolfriends' parents, growing up in Deerfield. And then the parents, most of them, split up.

Another way, the Scott way, is to behave like you trust no one at all. If there's something you can't tell the love of your life, keep it inside. Keep the shades on. Stay in control.

No wonder Scott fell for telepaths. Dating a telepath means never having to say you're sorry, because they already know whether you're sorry, and whether you would mean it, if you said it. It also means never having to prove you mean it.

There has to be another way. Is there another? Kitty-- she still thinks of herself as Kitty, and probably always will, though now she's Professor Kitty, or Professor Katherine, or Headmaster Pryde-- puts her head down on the incongruously old, authoritative oak desk. It's been the headmaster's desk since Charles Xavier was the headmaster and the school was on Graymalkin Lane, since Kitty Pryde was Welcomed into the X-Men: Hope You Survive the Experience! That was a running joke for a while; Kitty can't remember who started it, and she wishes it would stop. Instead everyone else gets it-- Jubilee got it, Armor got it, probably at some point even Anole got it. How can it still be a joke?

 How can her love life be serious? But it is: she's never been more serious about Piotr. He waited for her. She waited for him, sort of. She broke up with him, again, after he almost died for her, when they fought Juggernaut and Cyttorak and he almost died for her-- and, in that moment, he almost died for Illyana too. And then she broke up with him. And then, and then...

The other men-- the other Peters-- she's dated were failed attempts to figure out if she liked any man other than him, somebody with qualities he didn't have. But his qualities are the right ones in her men, or really, in her man: he's bigger than she is, and gentler than she is, and a far, far better listener, and quiet when she'd just keep talking, and when he does give advice it's the right advice, and he never, ever puts himself first. He knows where to put himself, when they're together, and where her voice comes from, and where she's likely to be, and what kind of authority she wants, when they're in a crowded room together, and he definitely knows where to position himself when they have a room to themselves-- where to put his thighs, for example. And his knees. And those collarbones, which fit right around her chin. And how to hold her. He's the spirit of self-sacrifice, and, also, happens to be everything she ever wanted in a man. 

But she never only wanted men. Ilya (she wonders if anyone else ever called her that, though it's the standard Russian nickname); Ilya was her first, and maybe the most fun she's had with anybody in bed, or out of bed. They had their own impenetrable codes: not just doorknob codes and what are you wearing, what are you up for codes, but virtual secret languages (yes, that means Doug figured some of them out). When she closes her eyes she thinks about parts of Ilya that maybe nobody else has seen. Or maybe she just doesn't know. Or, wait, what about-- 

There is another universe where Kitty and Illyana are still together, and another still where they got back together, where they hooked up when the school was X-Haven, in Limbo, when it was Illyana's primary job (as it is now Kitty's) to keep the students safe. In that universe, maybe, they are all living in Limbo. Or they're secretly dating, or they're open about it and married. Maybe they had a wedding in Central Park. She could totally live there.

There are a lot of universes, though. There's at least one where Bobby destroyed the whole world, covered it in ice. It was Kitty who managed to talk him down, that time, to take the Apocalypse seed out of his body, and stash it-- she can't let herself think about where.

There are universes where Kitty, and Piotr, never left Earth. There's at least one where he went into space as a teen, but never encountered Zsaji, and one where he went into space and just never left. Who is he dating, now that they're all adults, there?

There are universes-- probably a lot of universes-- where Kitty has been together with Rachel Grey, off and on, mostly on, for a very long time. A lot of things happened, to both of them, there in that tower off the Scottish coast. For Grey they were first experiences of safety, of feeling that nobody was going to make her do something she didn't want to do; for Kitty they were experiences of adulthood, of caring for others, of living in a place that wasn't a school. It turned out she likes school. Also, she likes space. Maybe she should volunteer to teach a Semester in Space.

Would Piotr go wth her? Would she want Piotr to go?

She would. But she'd also be keeping a notebook of things to tell Illyana when she got back. And, maybe, another notebook, of things to tell Storm. She likes notebooks.

Of course she does. The rest of her life, her science nerd life, her Professor Kitty life, has cast her almost entirely as a student, as a teacher, or as some sort of infiltrator-secret agent, someone who takes notes on what she's seen.

Also as someone who reads notes, who takes debriefings, who learns the worst, but secondhand. Some of the scariest things that have happened to her friends-- to Storm, to Ilya, to Piotr, and of course to Grey-- are things she's transcendentally lucky she's never seen.

When Kitty dreams, sometimes, she dreams about being held, protected, by the strongest steel shoulders and arms. She dreams about Piotr's knees, and his hips when they're flesh rather than steel (she likes to dig her fingernails into those hips), and the way her hair feels against his (non-metal) ribs.

But she also dreams about taking off Magik's modern, black-and-white costume, and about Ilya's flexible toes. And her tail. And her tail.

The bad dreams are not dreams in which she's been abandoned; they're dreams in which she fails, or abandons, her students. That's why she's barely speaking to Bobby now. Not because of the way he came out to her; because he's putting his very own personal hot boyfriend over the needs of the kids at the school. No one whom Kitty loved would ever ask her to abandon the kids who depended on her. But Bobby isn't, at his core, a teacher (though he is a superhero); Kitty really, really, is.  

Is it wrong that Kitty likes, wants to keep living in, the universe they have, the universe where-- she picks up her cell phone, puts it back down; picks up the old desk phone, puts it back down (it's the same fancy phone that was on the desk in Westchester, because it's mostly made of indestructible Shi'ar tech)-- the universe where Piotr came back to her, and, also, the one where she and Ilya are the same age, where they have what they've had, where she can tell Illyana absolutely anything?

That's assuming, of course, that Magik picks up the phone: which she will, if she's in her room at the Xavier Institute, and which she might, if she's at home in Limbo.  Like a lot of X-people she keeps two residences lately; the X-Men may have left the building in Limbo-- no, Kitty puns, the building itself has left the building-- but it would be irresponsible for Ilya not to keep track of what's happening back in that realm. And keeping track means living there, some of the time. A few nights a week. She does, of course, return messages. There's no cell phone service there-- "cell towers" are flaming prisons, in Limbo, if they are anything-- but there is a magical message system, one that that involves writing in a certain way, with certain kinds of feathers, in air.

Piotr is fighting Sentinels in Turkey (and, while he's there, picking up material for the school's unit on Byzantine art).

Ilya would understand. Would anyone else understand? Scott would. But of course Scott-- that Scott-- is gone now. "It's not a zero-sum equation," he said to her once, when he gave her his office key. Her office key. She still has the key. 

She opens the desk, and opens the drawer beneath the desk, and opens the drawer inside the drawer inside the drawer-- it's non-Euclidean Shi'ar technology, not bad for a physical filing system-- and looks at that key.

Kitty-- Professor Kitty-- thinks about equations all the time. Sometimes she'd rather be a professor of physics and mutant studies, back in Hyde Park, than run a school here. But only sometimes. Just like sometimes she'd rather be unattached-- it was important to spend a few years unattached-- than be dating Piotr. Or Grey, or teenage Illyana, or grownup Illyana (when she lets herself imagine that possibility), or really anyone. She's made the right choices, in this universe, for her. Some choices exclude some others. Unless there are quantum non-exclusion effects in play.

She tries again to work it all out in her head. Love isn't zero-sum, but time is. There are only 24 hours in each day, after all, and only so many cubic feet in the mansion, or in Central Park, or in this dimension. But of course there are other dimensions. And time in Limbo...

She's dating-- in this universe-- just one person at once. But that doesn't mean she can't confide in her friends.

It's not a choice, how she feels. It's a choice what she does; who she trusts, where she lives, who she feels she can tell. She makes notes. She writes notes, with a certain feather, in air. 

 

 

 

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Across the Multiverse](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13499866) by [Magik3](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Magik3/pseuds/Magik3)




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